by Jack Lewis
Sara joined him at his side.
“Let some air in, will you?”
“I’ve just fixed the boards.”
“They’re burning up.”
He made a show of stomping over to the window, though again he knew the act of annoyance had no target. Sara was right, always. She was right that the windows needed to be boarded up, and was right when she said they needed to be taken down again. He pulled at a corner of the board and pried it loose, as happy at how easy it was as he was annoyed at the poor job he’d done.
Once he pulled the window open he felt the touch of cool wind on his face, and then he shivered as it crawled down his back. The breeze wasn’t the only thing blown in. From outside came a groaning sound.
A second groaning sound followed it, this time from behind him. He turned round and saw Lindsey’s eyelids flicker. He joined Sara at the head of the bed. Inside his heart was exploding. This was it. Since the kids had gotten infected somehow and they’d fallen into comas, every single second of Damien’s life had led to this. The answer to a question he had never wanted to ask. One he never imagined having to think about when he’d held his new-born daughter in his arms all those years ago. He reached for Sara’s hand and squeezed it tight. Sara looked at him for a second as if startled by the contact, and then squeezed it back. Then both their eyes fixed on their children.
Lindsey groaned again. Her eyelids flickered like the wings of a moth and then opened. Her eyeballs were bloodshot. Damien gripped his wife’s hand tighter and waited. What was it going to be? What would he do if she were one of them?
“Mum?”
The croaky sound was the greatest thing he’d ever heard. Relief poured through him and flooded his veins. She’s immune, and that means the immune gene is inside one of us. He could have gotten down on his knees and cried.
Lindsey sat up and rubbed her eyes. Then she turned to her side and saw her big brother sleeping next to her in the bed.
“What’s wrong with Jack?” she said.
Damien took hold of her head and pressed it into his chest.
“It’s all going to be okay now,” he said, and for the first time he actually felt it.
The sound of groaning drifted louder through the window, and for a second the joy he felt left him, replaced by the feeling of wanting to lock himself in a room behind a strong door. Sara put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was the first voluntary contact from her in days.
“Check the barricades again honey? Please?”
He walked down the bare staircase, took a left and went into the kitchen. One of the boards had come loose next to the sink in yet another display of his poor workmanship. Across the kitchen, through a door that led to the utility room, he heard a crash.
He picked up a bread cutting knife from the sideboard, and to say he gripped it was an understatement. He walked forward one slow step at a time, head turned as if that would magnify any sounds. His footsteps seemed too loud to him, as if they were giant cymbal crashes that would draw out predators.
The wooden boards left little space for light to creep though, and as he got closer to the utility room he hoped his eyes would hurry up and adjust. As he neared the door his pulse hammered, and he gripped the knife even tighter. He put a hand on the door handle, said a prayer to himself, and turned it. He whipped the door open, raised his knife to head height and readied himself to meet the danger.
There was nothing.
Instead of slowing, his pulse beat faster and so much adrenaline pumped through him that he could feel it in his veins. He let out a long breath and wondered what would have to happen for him to ever feel safe again.
Across the house and up the stairs, there was a scream. He pushed the utility door away from him as he span round, and this time he didn’t care about the sound of his steps as he tore out of the kitchen. He rounded the corner and pounded upstairs and turned into the bedroom, where he saw that his son was awake.
He was sat on his sister’s chest, tearing at her face with greedy teeth and pulling away strips of skin. Lindsey eyes showed that she was beyond fighting, beyond even screaming. Damien took the room in two strides and grabbed hold of his son’s neck. Before he could yank him away his son turned and lashed out at him with his nails, giving him a searing hot scratch across his cheek. Then, as if bored, he turned back to his sister.
Damien felt his mouth open wide, but he was powerless to close it. His muscles atrophied and severed their connection to his brain, disobeying its commands the way a deserting army troop might disobey their general. Do something, he willed himself. Do something.
He was dimly aware of Sara somewhere in the room, but it was like a fog had spread and darkened everything but the children in front of him. He felt someone reach out to him and take hold of the knife in his hand. He turned his head but it was like his movements were in slow motion, and it was with shame that he saw his wife approach his children with a knife in her hand.
She looked oddly cool as she plunged the knife into their son’s head. His body flopped to the mattress and his blood splattered across the sheets. The room was filled with the sound of a little girl whimpering, and quiet as it was, Damien felt like putting his hands to his ears to drown it out. It became unbearable to him. Playing alongside it were the sounds in his head, ones that not even a hand to the ear would silence. You aren’t a man. You’re pathetic. You’d be better dead.
Sara leaned in to her daughter and kissed her forehead. She wiped her hand across it and smoothed back her hair, and when she pulled away her mouth was smeared with blood.
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice choked with tears, and plunged the knife into their daughter. The sound flowed through Damien’s ears and burnt a hole through his brain and down his throat until it settled into his stomach and became a vast blackness.
Sara turned her head toward him. Her eyes were feral now; the human in her was gone.
“He scratched you,” she said.
He put his hand to his cheek and felt that it was wet, and when he pulled it away his fingertips were red. He felt empty but sick at the same time. There was so much to process, but it felt like his brain wouldn’t let any of it in.
Sara took a step toward him, knife in hand and eyes that said she was ready to use it. He knew that one of them was immune. Their daughter had woken from the coma, so one of them had to be. In a selfish second that seemed to mock his parental grief, he could only think one thing.
What are my odds?
9
Heather
The sun crept up but the sky looked mean. Heather stood at her bedroom window and saw that the storm had finally stopped, but not until it had emptied days’ worth of rain over the green fields and concrete streets that made up the Capita lands. Somewhere near the Dome, almost behind it, black smoke curled up in to the air. Heather felt her eyes burn, but it wasn’t from smoke that was miles away. It was from a night of lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, with her thoughts turning over like a cement mixer.
They’d only met each other for minutes, but the face of the boy in Cresstone burned a silhouette in her mind. Leaving him there had been a mistake, and she hoped she wasn’t too late to correct it. Maybe if she went back to Cresstone she’d find him there in the same room surrounded by even more rotten apples cores. She could get him out of there and take him to Wes. The trader had good contacts and a corrupt heart, and she was sure that he could get him to the Resistance somehow. Then her part would be done and she could pick up whatever was left of her conscience.
Dressed and at the front door, she picked up a pair of waders and pulled them over her feet and up to her knees. The material was thick and it meant that she could get through any flooded parts of the town without worrying about disease ridden water splashing around her legs. She picked up a crowbar that was leant against the wall and hoped she wasn’t going to have to use it.
***
At Cresstone it seemed like the waders were needed but the crowbar wasn�
��t. The non-stop drenching had washed up all the debris from the streets, which had been carried along to drains that quickly became blocked. As the rain carried on unabated the water levels rose until now it reached almost to the top of her waders.
The stench of sewage was heavy in the air and Heather got the sense that as well as the scum that floated on the top of it, a significance dose of disease was carried by the flood water. She looked across the village ahead of her and then down at her waders, and she wondered if the boots would be enough to keep the water out. Part of her didn’t want to test them.
She pushed away the selfish thought and took her first sloshing steps through the water. As the dirty liquid lapped against her like a soiled tide, she suddenly felt like she was in a dream. It was one she used to have often as a kid, mainly in the years before she took up sports and became popular. In the dream it wasn’t disease ridden water but a swimming pool that the school used for lessons, and she was in the middle of it.
At one end, where the ladders hung, a group of boys and girls knelt and watched her paddle. They wore grins that stretched impossibly wide across their faces and they shouted things at her, but the words twisted on route and became nothing but grunts. One of the kids reached down, grabbed hold of a metal gate and pulled it up. There was a darkness behind it that seemed to stretch outside the pool as though connected to something by a tunnel. Something emerged from the darkness, and Heather’s heart lodged in her throat when she realised it was grey and long, with a jagged fin that pointed out of the water like the mast of a pirate ship. It slinked through water that was just murky enough to keep it a silhouette. As it got closer Heather felt the need to flee, to get to the other end of the pool and escape. She tried to get out of there but the water slowed her down, and with every step her movement slowed until finally she was frozen in place and the shark was getting closer and closer.
She closed her eyes and let the dream dissolve. As horrible as the water in Cresstone was, it wouldn’t hide any sharks beneath it. Come on you dick, she thought. Stop being scared.
Progress through the village was slower than she would have liked and at one point she lost her balance and disturbed the water, splashing a drop of it onto her face. Eventually she reached the street next to the one where she had seen the boy, and she was glad that the trip was nearly over. She would treat herself when she got home and boil enough water for a bath. It would be the first she’d had in months.
She turned the corner and saw that something was wrong. Across a street that resembled a council-house Venice she saw a small figure near the door of a house. It was the boy, and he had his back to her. The water rose all the way up his back and to his shoulders, and he looked to be tugging on something.
She waded over to him and saw him flinch as she approached. He turned, though not all the way, and when he saw her he screwed his face up. He splashed a hand in the water and for a second she thought he might try to get away from her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have left you.”
She waded closer but he thrashed in the water. The village seemed silent as though it were watching them both and waiting for something to happen. Heather felt like unseen eyes were trained on her. She looked behind her and half expected a shark fin to tear through the river of sewage.
“I’ve come to take you back,” she said. “I know someone who can help you.”
There was something wrong with the way the boy wouldn’t turn fully to look at her.
“My foot’s stuck,” he said.
“What on?”
“What do you care? Leave me alone.”
He didn’t resist as she walked up beside him. She took another look at the brown water and she was glad she hadn’t eaten breakfast. What am I doing? She reached into the water and felt a shock of cold cover her skin. She felt around until she grabbed the boy’s foot, and she knew there was something wrapped around it. How he’d gotten into this position she had no clue, but whatever it was, it was wrapped so tightly round his foot that she needed both hands to get him free.
“Hold this,” she said, and passed him her crowbar.
She was ready to use both hands to free him when she felt something snag on her waders. She thought it might have been underwater debris so she kicked her leg back, but something seemed to drag on her. As she tried to shake herself free the force of the thing on her wader became stronger. What the hell is it?
With as much force as she could she pulled her leg up and lifted it away. She took a step back. The water around her bubbled, and something shot up in front of her with a great splash. When she saw that it was an infected, she let out a sound that would have been a scream had she not choked most of it back.
It was a male infected. His skin was wrinkled from the water, and brown drips ran off his hair and over his face. He fixed a bestial stare on Heather and opened his mouth to show teeth not far from falling out. He cried out, almost in desperation, and lurched across the water to get at her.
All around them the water was disturbed as infected rose from it. Everywhere she looked the surface of the flood reservoir lapped and splashed as bloated infected stumbled toward her. Their steps were slow, as thankfully one part of Heather’s old nightmare was true; being in water did make it harder to walk.
The infected closest to her reached out again and came within an inch of grabbing her arm. She pushed him away and held her hand out to the boy. She felt the cold touch of metal as he pressed the crowbar into her palm, and as the infected strained for her again she swung the metal at his head. The infected’s neck snapped back but it reached for her again. Heather tensed her arm and guided the metal toward his skull, connecting with a blow that snapped through bone.
“You need to get yourself free,” she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” said the boy. It was the first real show of emotion she’d seen from him.
She passed him back the crowbar and again tried to get him free, but whatever was around his foot didn’t want to let him go. The infected around them moved slowly through the water, all of them honed in on the only two humans stupid enough to be there. It would take them a while to close the gap, but eventually they would. They had nothing but distance as their defence, and every second that went by eroded it.
“I need to get at whatever’s got your foot.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Don’t look behind you.”
Thoughts of Kim flashed in her mind, and she knew what she was about to do was stupid. She couldn’t leave him here again though, especially not like this. Not when the boy couldn’t even run. She took a deep breath and thought about what an idiot she was. Then she blew it out and took an even deeper one. She held it in, took off her mask and handed it to the boy.
Being underwater was no clearer than being above and staring into it, but then she realised that was because her eyes were shut. The seconds it took her to trick her brain into opening them seemed to stretch into minutes, and felt a discomfort in her lungs as they drained the air they held. She felt a sting on her eyeballs as the water splashed against them, but through the murky brown soup she saw the boy’s foot. A branch of ivy had somehow wrapped around it like a thread, and in a few seconds she was able to untie some of it. As she unwound it a pressure began to build in her chest until she thought that any second she might take in a gulp of dirty water.
She broke the surface like a whale jumping out of the sea, and the water splattered around her. She reached out for the mask, attached it and sucked in a lung-full of air. A shot of panic hit her when she looked around and saw that the infected were getting closer, their eyes hungry and their mouths open.
“Swing at anything that moves,” she said through the mask.
“Get a move on,” said the boy.
She took another breath and sunk once again into the flood. She opened her eyes underwater and felt the water sting her eyelids. It was like being
in the swimming baths again and feeling the chlorine burn her, except there was the real possibility she could get some kind of bacterial infection from the sewage. Somewhere away from them, she saw two heads bob under water. Her eyes adjusted and she realised it was two infected children walking through the water.
She reached for the boy’s foot and worked faster to get him free. Finally she unwound the last of the ivy. He started thrashing in the water and she almost took a foot to the face. She stood up out of the water, only to see an infected woman with swollen bingo-winged arms stretching out towards the boy. Heather’s chest began to burn again and the need for air built in her. She reached out for her mask, but as the boy went to pass it to her, the infected woman lunged. In his panic he opened his hand, and Heather watched as her mask hit the water and started to sink beneath it.
